We can brainstorm here about parts of a computer we want to cover in the lessons we're preparing together.

Here's the plan for today, as I flesh it out in my office Wed a.m. prior to meeting everyone at noon. The plan is essentially to Model and Demonstrate a set of spaces online where we can interact with our students, and have you Practice in those spaces, and Reflect on what you have practiced.

In order to start this I had to find an appropriate space in which to write. I like Etherpad because I can save revisions (and revert to them) and also it has a slider to enable me to track writing process or find a previous version, so it's constantly preserving your work. You can copy paste, link to, or download any version.

Google Docs is a great space but it's a little difficult to set up where you can do all that. I've noticed that students can wipe out all work up to a point inadvertently in Google Docs, and you might not be able to get it back. Etherpad is a better tool for working on the fly with students, since it's easily revertable to almost any prior state.

Disadvantages of Etherpad are (1) that it doesn't do graphics (so you might find it convenient to move from Etherpad to Google Docs), and (2) its instability (sometimes). First you have to find one. To find this one, I used my delicious acct http://delicious.com/vancestevens/etherpad

http://tinyurl.com/esppdo is a shared Google Doc (its greatest affordances are when used as a Web page and shared purposefully with small groups). Here we'll find the other Etherpad clone list I found and tag it in Delicious so it shows up at the delicious link above.

Now we've introduced several tools already for class interaction and cohesion:

When I work with students, I need to broadcast URLs to them in such a way they can reach them quickly.

As we've seen, one way to do this is to tag them in delicious. However, in class, delicious can sometimes take several minutes to propogate what you've tagged through the network so that it shows up on your class computers.

Another way then is to create a TinyURL. This works instantaneously.

Another way is to use Edmodo (or Twitter, or Yammer) to broadcast to them

You can also set up a class space that you or everyone can write to quickly. This could be at your Moodle or Bb course, in a Google Doc, or in a class wiki (either one that is shared with the class, or that only you can write to).

Can you think of other ways? If so, write them here ...

Before class I'll take these precautions:

I'll SAVE a copy of the pre-class revision as a fallback in case of disaster or vandalism during the class (this hardly ever happens, but good to have a saved version we can revert to)

I'll back up my work here: http://tinyurl.com/esppdo (mainly in case this Etherpad becomes inaccessible at an inopportune time, I'll be able to recover quickly in another Etherpad space).

I'll email the link to this document so everyone coming to class can see what we're doing today (once you get the link you'll be able to write on the document, for example you could write questions, or add useful information - in case of anything untoward or inappropriate or accidental, we'll have the saved and backed up versions to revert to).

I will show you how to create such a blog and how to password protect it if you wish (in case you want to make it private, not public, for just your class).

I will register those present as contributors to this blog.

I will email a copy of this document as way of creating a first posting

Once you see how easy that is I will invite you to email your reactions to and reflections on what you have learned today to the address esppdo@posterous.com

I will encourage you to comment on these postings so that you can see how Posterous works to combine blogging in both web and email spaces into a kind of forum that promotes conversation in your class.